'Thesis on domestication', bourgeois apathy after the acceptance of difference

When I had just published

Las malas

(Tusquets, 2019)

,

Camila Sosa Villada told me that literature is an act of transvestism, because it tries to build something new with old codes.

In that novel she mixed the magical and the testimonial to represent the transvestite communities of Córdoba, the city where she lives in Argentina.

Now it seems that she has wondered what would have happened to them if things had gone a little better for them.

It gets into the head of an actress who has achieved social, economic and romantic stability to explore what happens when everything is more or less fine.

According to her, there is no less science fiction in one novel than in the other, because the life of any transvestite is an irregularity in her environment.

And it seems that money and social acceptance are not enough to save her.

The nameless protagonist of

Thesis of a Domestication

(Tusquets, 2023) has a lot of its author because she is magnetic and elusive.

Like Las

Malas,

she has grown up with the hatred of her neighbors in a town in the mountains of Córdoba and prostitution, but in her case she has achieved the dream of the middle class: success and wealth, a non-aggression pact with her parents, a husband and a son who love her.

But all that is just a way.

She blandly broadens and narrows the focus to show “what becomes entrenched with the arrival of children, what crystallizes when life resolves itself, when you know where money and happiness come from.”

It is a literary topic of bourgeois apathy, but Camila Sosa reformulates it and keeps it interesting by introducing characters with nerve.

As a result of a mix between the tragic of Duras and the eccentric of Almodóvar, the protagonist of the novel focuses on what happens when the institution admits the difference, when there are no longer oppressions that maintain tension and it only depends on oneself not to let oneself carried by the belittling of custom.

In the novel, polyamory does not threaten or resolve the domesticity of bourgeois and boring marriage, but rather reinforces it.

The protagonist and her husband, a gay lawyer, rich and more handsome than her, live within the ideal of conventional marriage, trying to maintain the debauchery that they feel defines them with an open and sexually active relationship.

In recent years, the

zeitgeist

has pirouetted the institution of marriage and the monogamous couple without ever landing on their feet together, and it is curious how the approach of this novel immediately shows the farce behind the utopia: polyamory neither threatens nor solves the domesticity of their bourgeois and boring marriage, but reinforces it.

There is something more tragic than transgressive when the author states: “A single transvestite is enough to twist the life of a man, a family, an institution.

“A single transvestite is enough to undermine the foundations of a house, undo the knots of a commitment, break a promise, give up a life.”

As if starting from a maladjustment could only lead to permanent maladjustment.

The version that Tusquets publishes of

Thesis on a Domestication

is a rewriting of which

It was published for the first time in 2019, in the Página12 publishing house.

The rights for a film that will be released soon and starring the writer herself were immediately sold.

The adaptation makes a lot of sense, because the slow narrative time of the novel is very cinematic.

It seems that Camila Sosa wants her reader to feel the same suffocation as the protagonist when she hinders the progress of the plot - the central thread does not cover much more than a couple of days - with constant flashbacks, excursions and projections.

It is a more conservative and contained way of narrating than that of

The Bad Ones,

as if the author had gentrified the writing just as her protagonist had gentrified her life.

Look for it in your bookstore

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